Queeried's Michelle Penny is running the LA marathon (and she's blaming Billie Myers)

By Ley on Saturday, March 6, 2010 - 18:17

Have you ever made a comment to a friend to call their bluff? You know the kind: “If you finish that massive dessert, I’ll give you 10 Euros!”

You have? I thought so! Well, has it ever backfired on you in gigantic proportions? No?? Well, it has for Queeried's Michelle Penny.

Michelle is described on the site as “the lead writer and head honcho at Queeried, and a die hard, bore you to death advocate of LGBT rights”. So how, I hear you asking, does a self-proclaimed person capable of boring us to death, end up running the LA Marathon? This is where the lovely Billie Myers comes in.

On the 28^th of August 2009, Ms Myers posted a video as part of her Unscripted series, commenting on how she’d love her Facebook fan page up to 1000. This is when Michelle Penny made the decision to post these words on Twitter:

I'll run a marathon for charity if everyone gets Billie Myers Facebook Fan Page up to 1000.

After posting it, she immediately regretted it. Not because she didn’t want Billie Myers to reach her goal of 1000 fans, not at all. It was because by the time she thought about deleting the post, it had already spread all over Facebook and Twitter…leaving her no way to back out!!

7 days later her worst fear happened…the target had been reached…the marathon needed to be run!

Having given in to the thought that she will actually HAVE to run the marathon, the next step was to decide which charity she was going to choose to run it on their behalf. “[T]here was one I was immediately drawn to - the Jed Foundation, a charity with a mission that not I feel passionately about […], Billie Myers, does too.”

The Jed Foundation is an organization that works to reduce mental stress and suicides in college students. So for all the outrageousness of Michelle’s challenge she set for herself, the cause is more than worth it.